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Howto Install Docky on Fedora

If you know me personally, then you know that I'm a big fan of GNOME Do. As a keyboard savvy person I use Do extensively. Do is an application launcher similar to the Mac app Quicksilver. However the GNOME Do team has been putting a lot of research and development into it from the initiation. Result: probably the best application launcher out there for any platform.

Some months ago, Do included an interesting theme called Docky which made the launcher acts as a dock (a la Mac, Avant, Cairo Dock, etc.). With the integration of GNOME Do, there's no need to say that Docky was super cool. And it started gaining features in a high speed. Ultimately Docky was getting so developed that it became a separate project.

Installing GNOME Do on a Fedora system is as easy as:

$ sudo yum install gnome-do

There are some packages with the names starting from gnome-do-plugins*. With the addition of these GNOME Do can truly enhance your desktop experience. Give it a fair try, I'm pretty sure you'll be impressed.

However installing Docky on Fedora is a different story. So here I am having being fiddling with Mono tools for a hour or two and successfully installed Docky, to help you.

I started with the above linked guide, found some info on the Net and had to figure out a few things for myself. So I'm taking some fine information from the respective sources, as usual. :)

Note: BTW, I tried this on my Fedora 13 system. I believe for closer Fedora releases should also behave similarly. My intention was to get Docky running. So if your Mono development environment breaks, don't blame me. ;)

This step is not listed in the official guide. But since Fedora doesn't have the "gio-sharp" package in the repos, you'll need to build it from source, install and configure a few things.

For the simplicity let's assume that you are fetching the Gio# source to your home directory.

$ cd

$ git clone git://gitorious.org/gio-sharp/mainline.git gio-sharp

This command will fetch the source code of Gio# and place it in a directory named "gio-sharp". Alternatively you can instead use:

$ git clone http://git.gitorious.org/gio-sharp/mainline.git gio-sharp

3. Compile Gio#

Change into the directory with the Gio# code and compile.

$ cd ~/gio-sharp

There should be a file with a name similar to autogen-X.YZ.sh. In my case it was "autogen-2.22.sh". Run it like:

$ ./autogen-2.22.sh

$ make

$ su -c "make install"

Give the root password when prompted and it'll be installed.

4. Get the Docky source

Docky project uses Bazaar version controlling system (it's hosted on Launchpad). You can do:

$ bzr branch lp:docky

Needless to say, you'll need Internet access for the first few steps of this howto. The last command will create a directory named "docky" in your current directory.

5. Set a couple of Environment Variables

In order to build Docky properly we need to set a couple of Environment Variables. We can do this inside a configuration file such as ~/.bash_profile. (To set proper variables system-side you can use a file like /etc/profile)

If you look carefully you'll noticed that what we set as MONO_PATH is the location where the gio-sharp.dll file was installed after the compilation.

Finally we need to either log out and log in to the system or run the following command:

$ source ~/.bash_profile

Now you are ready to compile and run Docky.

6. Compile Docky

Go to the directory with the Docky source (i.e. docky directory from Step 4)

$ cd ~/docky

Then run the configure and make commands:

$ ./autogen.sh

$ make

$ su -c "make install"

Now that you have Docky installed you may want to add it the startup programs. However make sure you try it first. Just run from any terminal

$ docky

And enjoy your work.

As you saw we a couple of unpackaged software at our hand, namely Gio# and Docky. You might even ask me to maintain those packages for Fedora. While I'm actually working towards becoming a Fedora package maintainer, I'm not sure I want to package Gio#. Someone who knows her/his way around the Mono dev environment should be better take care of it rather than me.

Anyway, I've written this down quickly after finishing my installation. So there might be mistakes. Let me know if you bump into a mistake done by me while writing thing. You can alway use the official guide as the baseline.

Disclaimer: I'm not a pro-mono or anti-mono zealot. I do have concerns about Mono's legal standing. But this post is just for people who want to get the awesome Docky running under Fedora.

hi Gaveen, Man thanx, your post was easy to follow for the second time, I guess the first time(about a week ago) I did not see a lot and follow correctly but now I just revisited it again and it worked just like you prescribed thanx.

@Fred: Hi, I'm not sure what exactly is the problem. But there are workarounds you can try.

It seems like the gio-sharp repo on gitorious isn't maintained anymore. The last changes on master is a few months old.

Luckily if you Google you get a couple of more places with the gio-sharp sources. As I said before I'm not keeping close tab on Mono development and I don't know which is the blessed repo. So I'm going to just pick the GitHub one.

In the step (i.e, Step 2) where you clone gio-sharp repo, use the GitHub version instead of Gitorious one. It seems to be kept updated.

hi i just installed fedora 13 on my laptop and its great so far but before i installed fedora i had ubuntu and ubuntu had docky. i didnt like ubuntu very much so i installed fedora it works perfectly but i really want to have docky on it. Could you tell me how to do it. am i supposed to install certain packages.

i just recently installed fedora 13 on my laptop and before i was running ubuntu 10. ubuntu was ok but i like fedora much more so im going to stick with it but i really want to install docky or something like it on fedora. its really easy to do it on ubuntu but its a bit harder on fedora could u please help me out i would really apprciate it. Thanx

The official guide now mentions that you need to install gio-sharp package from source. It's a good thing they've put it there.

@Sanjay: Docky is not available in Fedora official repos (and nor in the Package DB or the Build System) and RPMFusion repos as of 14 September 2010. That's why I wrote this guide to help obtain the source code, compile it and install it in your system. It's inconvenient but it's probably the most trustworthy way.

However if you are not willing to put up with doing this manually, then you can try your luck with Googling. I see there are some unofficial (i.e., not upstream or Fedora & RPMFusion) RPM packages out there. You can try but YMMV depending on how well they are made and maintained.

I also hope that someone starts packaging and maintaining it for Fedora. But until such a time those are your immediate options.

@Marc: Did you really install from RPMFusion? I'm pretty sure I didn't find gio-sharp in rpmfusion-* repos, at least not in F13 i386 repos. And I still don't see it there. Maybe I'm missing something.

Luckily gio-sharp is available in F14 repos which is due to be released in a few hours. If you'd like to use the package in F13 before that, you can install it from "Rawhide" (which will become F14 repos in a few hours time).

The current build error:-** (/usr/local/lib/docky/Docky.exe:11818): WARNING **: The following assembly referenced from /usr/local/lib/docky/Docky.exe could not be loaded: Assembly: gio-sharp (assemblyref_index=10) Version: 2.14.0.0 Public Key: 35e10195dab3c99fThe assembly was not found in the Global Assembly Cache, a path listed in the MONO_PATH environment variable, or in the location of the executing assembly (/usr/local/lib/docky/).

** (/usr/local/lib/docky/Docky.exe:11818): WARNING **: Could not load file or assembly 'gio-sharp, Version=2.14.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=35e10195dab3c99f' or one of its dependencies.

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